The Writing's on the Wall

The Tribune is continuing its death spiral with another round of buyouts. Among those leaving is Mark Gonzales, longtime beat writer for the Cubs. In bidding his colleague adieu yesterday, Paul Sullivan noted that, “Our current sports staff is smaller than our entire Preps Plus staff was back” in the late 1980s, when he started covering sports. Preps? It’s a word hardly seen in print (or online) these days. Basically, if you don’t play basketball or football, you won’t find reporters covering your game or meet. Clare played varsity softball her entire high school career, 2006-10. For her last two years, I “kept the book,” which entailed scoring games; computing batting and earned-run averages; rating umpires (bad Doug was forever whispering in my ear whenever I performed that task); and calling both Chicago dailies with the score and highlights when we won. Junior year, Clare hit .425; senior year, she “slipped” to .350 while doubling her homerun production to ten. All four years, her teams won regionals in the playoffs before losing in sectionals. In other words, there was a good chance of seeing my daughter’s name in print in the sports’ section back then. Early on junior year, she let it be known she didn’t want me to put her name ahead of everyone else’s on the team. My daughter was being both a good teammate and pragmatic; too much Clare in the box scores and egos might get bruised. I did as instructed, and nobody ever complained, at least to me, about what names ran in the papers. The Sun-Times had an annual feature in the spring, the best hundred Chicago softball players; Clare made the list at second base her senior year. That doesn’t exist anymore, or regular coverage for softball in either paper. Junior year, Clare had a walk-off single in extra innings to earn Morton a split against mighty New Trier; three times that year she drove in the winning or go-ahead run in extra innings. It was that kind of spring. A reporter for the Sun-Times spent the second game in our dugout. I made sure he got everyone’s name right and told him about Clare’s clutch hitting; the online story even included a quote from the hitting hero. We raised our daughter to avoid speaking in cliches. Today, we wouldn’t bother. Nobody’s around to cover the games to tell readers why it matters.